Abstract

The Delay-/Disruption-Tolerant Networking Architecture calls for new design principles that will govern data transmission and retransmission scheduling over challenged environments. In that context, novel routing, transport and application layer algorithms have to be established in order to achieve efficient and reliable communication between DTN-nodes.In this study, we focus on the evolution of the terrestrial Internet into the Interplanetary or Space Internet and propose adoption of the Deep-Space Transport Protocol (DS-TP) as the transport layer scheme of choice for the space networking protocol stack. We present DS-TP's basic design principles and we evaluate its performance both theoretically and experimentally. We verify that practice conforms with theory and observe great performance boost, in terms of file delivery time between DTN-nodes, in case of DS-TP. In particular, the gain of DS-TP against conventional proposals for deep-space communications increases with the link error rate; under conditions DS-TP can improve the performance of the transport layer protocol by a factor of two (i.e., DS-TP can become two times faster than conventional protocols). (C) 2009 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.